The Electrocardiogram.

This creased piece of paper was the source of all our problems yesterday, it shows what The Old Lady's ticker was up to - and it's not for the faint hearted. While I am not a cardiologist, as an engineer I have some expectations of charts like these; there are twelve different traces representing twelve different views of the heart, one expects to see patterns, predictability and even some sort of elegance. One expects to see nicely smoothed and rounded shapes. The heart is a system so one expects to see evidence of it here, but what do we have? Twelve shapes with little similarity to one another apart from the same steady periodic rhythm (which is the good news).
Every cardiac episode she's had over the last five years or so has left it's mark, a piece of damaged muscle that disrupts the electronic circuitry so that a shape is distorted on a portion of a trace and, the next time, another distortion occurs on a different place on another trace . A cardiologist could give you a lot of detailed information from this chart, me, I can just say, "That's not right."

Anyway having been told, in the wee small hours, that she would be staying in hospital until Monday but, based on past form, expecting her to be there for at least a week, I cancelled her carers' visits until further notice. The nurses must have had enough of her by lunch time as they phoned to ask us to go and collect her. She must have really annoyed them, though when we arrived to pick her up, they politely said what a nice lady she is.

She's obviously not going to be giving up any time soon.